Narcissist
by justbecauseofthis
Summary: An aristocrat from the interior agrees to give her patronage to the Survey Corps. She's alluring, she's cunning, and she's a collector of men. Captain Levi may be the Apex of humanity, but even he will succumb to the venom of her fangs, or so she thinks. As she carries out her plan, something unanticipated gets in her way: a maniac with glasses. [before the breach of wall Maria]


Warnings: Masochistic Levi, Sadistic OC, gender fluidity, genderqueer Hanji, man-hating, some gender dysphoria, dubcon.

* * *

It begins with a woman and it begins with a man, as it sometimes does. And it begins with a woman who has flourished into full figure by an opulent upbringing, with an insatiable appetite between her thighs and miles upon miles of skin she's claimed. And it begins with a man with a chemical makeup that waits for a catalyst to incite a strange passion for suffering that sleeps, unrealized, within his gut. And like all tragic stories, it begins at a party—

She's wearing a long liquid gown that ripples as she glides over the ballroom floor. It carries its own kind of air, its own gust of wind, that lifts the skirt about her calves, suspending the gown in a soft floating whisper. It's backless, plunging into a fluid U that bares the long, curve of her spine. The silk flows down her body; the sides, hemmed in as they are, yield the titillating profile of her breasts, without giving them up to full disclosure.

It seems her gown defies the laws of physics, never giving up more than the side contour of her flourished figure. Her long red hair is loosely pinned up by glittering jewels. She has a long, graceful neck; bold, rogued lips; heavy, black eyelashes.

Sitting at a round table, draped by a white cloth, Erwin informs them that she's an aristocrat from the interior. She has a lot of money. And she has offered to personally fund their next expedition. Levi holds a champagne glass by the flute, scrutinizing her as he does any aristocrat, suspicious of anyone with too much money. His judgement is not muddled by sexual appreciation, despite the way her hips flare under her dress.

She's brought to the dance floor on the arm of another aristocrat—and swung about, her dress still somehow defying physics, as her curves swing with her, each motion rippling through her soft, ample figure with a feminine elasticity. The liquid dress whirls out from her long legs, as though the wind that it carries has gusted up beneath her suddenly. Men all around wait, watching with a stupid, doglike anticipation as her dress flimsily slips and slides and swishes about, their keen eyes following each sigh of silk.

Hanji watches the men watching this woman—and she thinks she can see their fantasies play out across their faces, of ripping the dress away and swinging her around like that across the ballroom floor, letting her twirl from one man to the next, passed from body to body, her high-heeled shoes clacking against the floor; and each man would get his turn, swinging her about in an endless dance, until the plasticity faded from her skin and she withered on the inside.

Hanji takes her eyes off the dance floor and puts them on Levi instead. She relaxes against the back of her seat. He's drinking from his champagne glass, in profile to Hanji, his chin in his hand, staring out onto the balcony. Bloodless rings hang under his eyes, and his rigid, contemplative lip is drawn down. For a man, he has a delicate nose. And perhaps that's why he's different. His nose is delicate, which makes him inviolable. Then she looks at Erwin, who has a distinctly masculine nose, and he's different too, but she realizes not for the same reason.

"Are you certain her interests lie in humanity's future?" Hanji says. "Or do they lie beneath your belt, Erwin?"

Levi turns his eyes from the balcony, putting them on Hanji now. His face doesn't move.

"She was very generous with her money," Hanji goes on. "It only makes sense that you'd give her something in return."

Levi throws back his champagne. Erwin levels his stare on Hanji's glasses.

"Your curiosity in my love life is quite sudden," he says. "And quite unsolicited."

Levi puts down his glass. It's empty. He rises from his seat.

Hanji watches him leave, tracking his passage between other tables. He begins speaking to the bartender, sliding his elbows onto the counter. She can see, even from this distance, the steady, delicate tilt of the nasal bone.

"Love life?" she says. "I assumed it was a business matter."

"Do you really think so low of me?"

"Are you telling me her wealth had no influence over you?"

"Our business matters had no influence over our personal matters and vice versa. I'm surprised by your doubt in my professional conduct."

Hanji clicks her tongue on her teeth and takes the glass flute between her fingers. "Well, it is just like a man to—"

"Hanji." Silently, abruptly, Levi has returned. He sets down his refilled glass. The white champagne effervesces sublimely. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were the jealous other woman. But perhaps, more simply, you've made a strange hobby out of meddling in matters that don't involve you."

"You're right. I do find others' matters incredibly entertaining."

"Creep."

"Clean freak."

He pauses, mid-inspection, of his pristine black blazer. He lifts his eyes then, running his palms down his jacket one last time. "All right," he says and sits down. "You've been sitting there, for the last fifteen minutes, with a scary expression on your face. Perhaps if you weren't making that scary face, someone might ask you to dance."

"Do you want to dance with me, Levi?"

"No."

"Will you dance with me?"

"No."

She turns her inquiry on Erwin. "How about you, then?"

He smiles, reaches out, and opens his fingers. "That sounds like a fine proposal," he says, and she puts her hand inside the wide spread of his palm. Her fingers become small and insubstantial like tiny minnows swimming in a pond.

They get up and leave. Levi looks out at the balcony, holding his chin in his hand. He nurses his champagne, the glass held steadily to his bottom lip.

As Erwin and Hanji move to an unoccupied space on the ballroom floor, their shoes mirror one another, producing matching clacks of a man's heel against hard, polished marble. Stopping, they face each other. Hanji puts her hands on Erwin's shoulders and he puts his hands on her waist. Erwin is wearing a black suit and tie. Hanji is wearing a black suit and tie too. Erwin steps and leads. She follows. Sheer skirts swish and swell all around Hanji. Extravagant cufflinks glitter in the warm tones of light. Erwin's cuffs brush her cuffs, and she feels, strangely, that she has sunk into a bed of roses, embalmed, wearing a dead man's suit.

"Good evening, Commander Erwin." They both turn. It is the woman with the sideless, liquid gown. The woman smiles.

"Hello, Lady Narcissa," says Erwin. "You look absolutely stunning this evening."

"You're too kind."

Hanji's hands come off of Erwin and she adjusts her glasses. Narcissa looks at Hanji sidelong through glittering, yellow eyes.

"This is Squad Leader Hanji Zoe."

Narcissa curtsies. By a few inches, she surpasses Hanji's height. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Squad Leader."

Hanji claps the woman on the back, grinning. "No, no, the pleasure's all mine!" The impact of Hanji's palm jerks through Narcissa, slapping out of her a small, unladylike grunt. The noblewoman runs a smoothing hand through her hair. Hanji says, "You were very generous with your patronage, Lady Narcissa. Words can't express our gratitude."

"Yes, of course. While others may think otherwise, I believe your efforts will lead us to true freedom. A world liberated of titans and fear, what an admirable dream."

"That means a great deal coming from someone of such prestige," says Erwin.

Hanji feels a hand slide onto the small of her back, not touching, exactly, but insinuated against the lower half of the spinal column. By her shoulder, a cap of black hair emerges. Neatly parted, off-center, slicked with a bit of grease for the night's special occasion.

"All right, stop begging," Levi says. "I'll dance with you." His voice is low, placid, carrying through the noise of the ballroom by deep, resonating tones rather than by volume.

"Are you drunk?"

"Maybe a little."

"Well, in that case." She looks down at him. Her eyes fall to his pristine part and she sees a blue refracted halo of hair-shine, made by the light, the grease, and the blackness of his pigmentation. "I'll take what I can get."

"You're Captain Levi, correct?" says Narcissa. Her red lips are striking on her face.

"Correct." Levi doesn't look at her.

"I'm Narcissa Rais."

"I'm aware." Levi still doesn't look at the noblewoman, attention fixed to Hanji, and guides her away, the hand on the small of her back insinuating her toward the center of the ballroom. Narcissa's yellow eyes follow after them.

They stop and Hanji puts her hands on Levi's shoulders, and he wraps his fingers around her waist. She begins to step and he follows. Pulling him closer, she slants her mouth by his ear.

She says, "So you needed some alcoholic encouragement to dance with me?"

"You think too much of yourself, truly."

"I wouldn't want to underestimate my own effect over you."

"You're not that special, four-eyes."

"But I am special?"

"You're on a spectrum."

"What's that supposed to mean?" She looks at him penetratingly through her glasses. Levi says nothing. "What's that supposed to _mean?_ " she says again. "Explain it."

"I'm not going to."

"That's fine," she says. "In return, I'm only going to dance you very, very hard."

She swings him across the dance floor, and he weaves his feet after hers. Pivoting, she swings him again in another direction. He spins against her, his hair lifting off his forehead, his shoes gliding frictionless on the polished marble. Abruptly, she ceases turning. Carried by their momentum, Levi doesn't stop, flung past the sudden stillness, and their chests knock together. They lose breath. He glares up at her.

The corners of his mouth flex with what he wants to say. Though if he does in fact speak, she doesn't hear it, too involved with what's happening around them.

Hanji looks past Levi, holding firmly to his shoulders, her eyes flicking from face to face, which seem to all be looking at her, inspecting, dissecting, the way she inspects and dissects creatures of enigmatic origin.

There's a stiff, defensive edge to her now. She wears a black suit and tie. Levi wears a black suit and no tie; the top two buttons of the white dress shirt have been left open.

Levi's hands wrap Hanji's waist. That doesn't matter, though, because they're both wearing suits. By that wind of its own, Narcissa's dress balloons up around her legs. Erwin's hands sit very low on her spine, and Narcissa has musical laughter that yields her perfect white teeth. As Erwin snaps her around, quite viciously, the dress slides away from Narcissa's naked sides, divulging more contour, more white skin. Hanji rotates Levi at a much slower pace. Narcissa's eyelashes lower on her cheekbones, and through their heavy, black screens, she leers out.

"I don't want to dance anymore," says Hanji.

"Lost interest already, have you?" Levi searches her face. She meets his eyes, giving nothing away. "A short-lived passion," he goes on. "Even for you. Surely your attention's got a longer shelf life than that."

"Oh, but it doesn't. I'm already bored. The only thing that can seem to hold my attention for any span of time is—"

"Yes. You're fascinated with titans to a disturbing degree." His hands are firm on her waist. "But that's not the reason for your sudden change in mind."

The touch of his eyes feel each texture in her expression until she's almost certain he can chart the geography of her thoughts. Thrusting out her chin, swiveling her head, she grins a cold, rigid slice of teeth.

"Look at how popular we are, Levi. They can't keep their eyes off us." With an overgenerous flourish of her wrist, she gestures at an ogling dancing couple. Her eyes are wide, her smile stiffened into a white gash. The dancing couple remove their interrogative stares, and their lips begin to move quickly, maliciously, at each other. Levi doesn't take his eyes from Hanji's face. Bending her head, she puts her voice into his ear, whispering, "The way they stare, you'd think we were two abnormals."

Hanji stops dancing, Levi stops in turn. He follows her sightline, and together they watch Erwin snap Narcissa around, the dress rippling away from her, as though there to satisfy a grasping need, the silk suspending across her body for the nearest man to seize up and rip, and take her there on the marble floor in front of everyone.

While they watch, Hanji and Levi, by some invisible centrifuge, are slowly pushed apart, soon standing without touching, as though a palpable force of status quo has erected a publically acceptable gap between their identical patent leather shoes. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiles.

"They go well together," Hanji says.

Levi looks at her. ". . . you're acting out of character."

Still smiling, she puts her hands in her pockets, posture drawn up high in a carriage of pure dissimulation. "Never mind me, Levi. It's all nonsense."

Her men's shoes clack off the dance floor. He doesn't stop her. Pocketing his hands, Levi returns to the bar.

###

The hotel room's mirror foists on Hanji the image of a face with two brown eyes and an aquiline nose and a mouth full of large teeth. She has a nose that falls on the continuum somewhere between Levi and Erwin, not delicate but not masculine, either. She lets down her hair and uses her fingerpads to rub tension from her scalp. Her hair musses around her hands. She rakes through the tangle, pushing it back from her forehead. It falls loose around her eyes. On the hotel bed sits a duffel bag.

In the doorway, Levi emerges like a soundless figure materializing midstride out of nothing, to lean insubstantially against her doorframe. His arms are crossed. He's still wearing his suit with the collar undone. "You've been acting out of character," he says. "What's the reason?"

Hanji doesn't flinch at the suddenness of company, accustomed to Levi and his ways. "I don't know what you mean," she says. From her duffel bag she withdraws a pair of men's white briefs and sets them carefully on the bed.

"Cut the bullshit," Levi says, his voice quiet and calm. "Could it be that you're upset about Erwin doing the deed with that aristocrat hag?"

"HAH." At the mention of Narcissa, Hanji's mood drops another notch toward insufferable. Her frustration extends beyond that woman, though. She had realized a while ago that it wasn't even Narcissa with whom she was angry.

"That's not it."

She hooks a finger around her necktie and tugs it loose. Then she begins to pick apart the buttons of her shirtfront. Once the buttons are undone, she opens the shirt and turns to the doorway. Her chest has been bound down with compression bandages, clamped into a flat, sexless plane. Levi remains leant against the doorframe, without expression, without depth, his arms crossed. His eyes haven't moved from her face.

"Am I even a woman?" Hanji says.

Levi's attention goes over her, following the distinct line that cuts down her muscled stomach. His eyes lift again. There isn't any symptom of interest. Just the usual cold, brick wall that resides beneath his visage.

"Who knows?"

"Are you a man?"

He lifts his shoulder in a shrug. "Man or woman, it doesn't make a difference one way or another. Not outside the walls, anyway. Everyone is titan fodder out there, regardless. Fortunately, titans don't discriminate."

"Yes, of course." She scrapes a hand through her hair and lifts the glasses from the bridge of her nose. The frames settle again and, resigned, Hanji returns her eyes to Levi's face. "I'm acting strange, aren't I?"

He looks at her, then exhales. Oddly, it's not unlike the exasperated sigh of a mother. He comes away from the doorframe, approaching. He reaches a hand onto the top of her head. Still, oddly enough, the gesture reminds Hanji of a mother's consoling touch. "It's in your nature to act strange. You're an abnormal, after all, and you fall on the spectrum of such." His hand withdraws and turns to touch her loose hair with his knuckles. He isn't like a mother anymore. Hanji doesn't know what he is.

He goes on, "You're a woman if that's what you want to be; that's how I see it."

She turns her head, her hair going away from his fingers. They linger a moment more, in empty space, as though feeling for something invisible and nostalgic, then he puts his fingers away, crossing his arms over his chest again. She sheds the button up shirt, standing there in her compression bandages, with wide and powerful shoulders.

"I'm an abnormal," she says. "I don't care to be a woman."

"That's fine, then." He turns and starts toward the door. "You can assume whatever role you choose. You have that freedom. Don't compare yourself to that aristocrat hag. You're a sharp-minded person. In a trial of survival, you win every time—and that's all that matters."

"Levi," Hanji says abruptly, locating in his tone a kind of acquainted wisdom. "Why do I get the impression you're speaking from personal experience?"

His hand has gripped the doorframe, his eyes pinned back on her. "When you're constantly put in juxtaposition to a tall, blond bastard with a square jaw, I think it's natural to feel uncertainty."

"Oh," she says, surprised that she's never noticed it before. She's never noticed the way Erwin stands side by side with Levi, imposing his height and presence by simply being there, diminishing Levi, without knowing it, to his abbreviated, unimpressive stature, and Levi becomes, rather than Humanity's Strongest Soldier, a disillusionment, an anticlimax. A man with a delicate nose and a slender chin.

Levi continues, "But it's only within the interior that I have the luxury to contemplate my . . . faults."

"Oh," Hanji says again, not knowing what else to say. "Well, if it makes any difference—which I doubt it will—I find you quite attractive."

"I don't remember asking for your opinion."

"That only makes sense," she says thoughtfully. "Since you didn't ask for it."

He lets go a breath, turned away, his hand still gripping the doorframe. Light sheds across the nape of his neck, his head bent forward a little. His voice is very still. "Goodnight, four-eyes."

"Yes. Goodnight, Levi. See you in the morning."

###

Having followed Captain Levi into the courtyard, she had watched him stand at the water's edge of the little retention pond behind the hotel. She had thought he would shuck off his shoes and feel the water on his bare feet. He never did, though, standing there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the water lapping at the shoreline.

Instead of wondering what he's doing, what he's thinking, Narcissa wonders what expression he makes when he comes. He has such an immobile, depthless face, hardly one accommodating the uninhibited honesty of orgasm. She imagines a face of restraint, one with shut eyes and turned cheek, the veins in his neck expanding as he struggles to disguise the utter helplessness of sexual culmination. He doesn't know it yet—

He hasn't the slightest suspicion that he's currently under fire. Being the apex at the top of the food chain lends itself to the sort of peak position that, if goes unchallenged, will give way to complacency. However, this won't be the first time Captain Levi has been target of the hunt. And Narcissa has studied up on just how, exactly, Commander Erwin Smith had captured the strongest man alive under thumb. Although their end results will differ slightly, the tactic will be the same.

It's about time the apex is challenged. And Narcissa will most certainly have Captain Levi under her command.

Now, to get to from point A to point B, it's about luring the wild animal into a trap and stripping down his ego, so that she can use her hands (and whatever else) to wring him into the shape she wants. Preferably on his back, lashed to her bed, crushed small between her thighs.

In a soundless advance, she comes out of the shadow and into the moonlight, and in front of her, Captain Levi, with his head bent, watching his shoes, perceives her presence despite her soundlessness. He moves his eyes first, then slowly lifts his chin, turning at the neck, to acknowledge her approach, sidelong. A cold, pale light moves across his face to pull his profile into view. His fine-boned nose and his contemplative mouth turn to silhouette against the full moon suspended low in the horizon. The moon shines, temporal, like a white dial.

For a moment, Narcissa stands still, appreciating him in silver highlight, the breadth of his shoulders and the black of his hair. His mouth, she sees, is softened, as though he's about to be kissed. Narcissa doesn't imagine kissing him. She imagines sliding her fingers into his mouth to procure a warm, liberal slick of saliva to thrust her fingers up inside herself with.

Clutching her skirt in hand, she moves toward him with a mitigated step, softening the impact of her high-heeled shoes on the sand. He's motionless, moving his eyes alone to follow her passage.

She bows her head to get a full view of him, and their faces just miss one another, his stock-still, turned to the side, hers bent forward with her eyes reaching around to touch the opened collar of his shirt. Under her thick lashes, she lifts her eyes to his face. In the same instant, he lifts his chin, baring more of his strong throat, to catch her in a shrewd side-eye. She smiles, says nothing, and turns to the pond, her stare dragging away from his throat like a knife.

She tosses her hair behind her shoulder, letting her hand linger by her collarbone. Her spine is elongated; she feels him looking. Touching her neck lightly with the fingertips, she turns back a shoulder, letting the delicate sideless gown flirt with the risk of exposure. His attention is on her face. Her hand moves from her neck, down to the neckline of her dress, touching the soft feminine swell there. His keen eyes follow the movement of her fingers. She smiles when his eyes, at last, fall to her softest flesh. His attention slides past her then, to the large, dial-face moon.

"Do you often go off by yourself, Captain?" she says, finally, her voice ground down by a vicious, thick silence. "Who knows what kind of monsters hide in the dark."

He blinks slowly, with the night on his face. He says nothing. She patiently watches his mouth.

"Though I suppose the real monsters lurk beyond the walls."

"I'm not so certain." He looks at her, a reasonable deadbolt of suspicion locked behind his eyes. "So . . . you're sponsoring the Survey Corps, huh?"

"Indeed, I am," she says. "But let's forgo the platitudes of appreciation; is that all right with you?"

"Good, then." He turns around, without unpocketing his hands, and begins walking away. His motion is silent and insubstantial.

"Instead of thanking me," Narcissa says, raising her voice to carry across the expanding distance, "will you tell me something, Captain Levi?"

He pauses, inverting his head, his eyes pinned back on her. "What is it you want to know?"

"I want you to respond carefully, now. My invaluable patronage may hinge on your answer. Tell me, Captain, is your heart true?"

He turns and doubles back to the edge of the water, without looking away from her and without showing his hands. He brings his shoulders square. "What are you asking me?"

"I want to know what sacrifices Humanity's Strongest Soldier is willing to make." She smiles. His expression is calm and very still, looking up into her face, his throat stretched back to accommodate her full height.

She lifts her hand, reaching out, to put it on his cheek. He doesn't move. She touches the bruised, sagging sleeplessness under his eyes with her fingers, then pushes against his flat, pensive mouth, watching as the lips give in under her touch. She imagines those lips gasping between her thighs. Her own mouth sags open, channeling in a sweet, slow breath.

He moves his face away from her hand, bends at the waist, picks up a stone. He holds it, turning it over and over, steadily. Narcissa takes stock of that hand, gauges its shape and strength, weighing its potential to punch up inside her. She wets her lips.

He says, "I can't help but wonder what this is about."

He tightens his grip around the stone, squeezing it in his fist. His wrist furls in a strong snap, his hand poised across his chest with the throw. Blurring out of his hand, the stone goes skidding across the water for a long distance.

He puts his hand in his pocket. "Now, correct me if I'm wrong. But I get the impression you want something from me."

"I don't want some _thing_ from you, Captain," she says. "I want _everything_ from you."

"Oh?" he says without inflection. "How greedy."

"What do you expect of an aristocrat from the interior?"

"Yeah . . . What a joke." He sighs, rolls out his neck. Each movement, each sound is eloquent with sexual potential. "I could use a drink." He looks at her coldly.

Narcissa smiles without warmth. "It would've been naïve to expect you to surrender willingly. But since you seem confused, let me delineate your position. I have money—a lot of it—and I have immense political clout. The Survey Corps, as you know, is perpetually under fire for bringing precisely nothing to fruition. So it goes without saying that the public majority demands your liquidation. They're quite sick of fattening up those godforsaken monsters out there."

"I'm aware."

"Very good. So you understand, then, that I'm—or more specifically my money and reputation are—necessary to you. I won't mince words when I say this, Captain Levi: But if I so desired, I could command you to your knees, wrap my thighs around your face, and you'd have no choice but keep your pretty mouth open as I fucked myself down on your tongue."

She watches his face, looking for the precise moment at which her words bite into him. His face yields only a long, expressionless blink, and his voice gives away even less.

"I see, now." He turns his pale, depthless eyes out at the water. "You hate men. That's what this is about."

Her skirt swishes around her calves in a silky murmur. She comes behind his heel. It was never physical chains or iron bars that caged the strongest man alive and wrought him into an obedient soldier. It was something less concrete, it was something more conceptual, and Narcissa has the necessary networks to cage him the way Commander Erwin Smith had done. She has already begun setting her web of chains around him.

Whited by the moon, he holds himself high, inviolable, his hands confined by his pockets, his patent leather shoes set apart and sturdy beneath him. Her hands come around, reaching from behind, to insert the ends of her fingernails under his belt. Her chest sinks heavily onto his shoulders. Her voice is warm on his ear—and cloying.

"I let your commander come inside me."

"How generous of you."

"And that other man, what's his name? the big, blond one with the mustache—yes, you know whom I mean—" Fanned out to expand across his waist, her hands clasp down on him, her fingernails still inserted, halfway, under his belt. "I let him fuck my tits."

"Is that right?"

His tone is inflectionless, indifferent. The hot fangs of desire bite down in Narcissa's gut. Her nostrils flare, and her eyes roll back. She grabs hard at his waist, pushing her cleavage up against his shoulder blades. She puts her lips at the corner of his mouth and tastes the residual tang of champagne on his skin.

"My generosity has a limit, you understand. And so does my patience."

He doesn't move, looking out at the water.

She removes one hand from his pants to press her fingers into his face, turning his head, parting his jaws that way. Holding his teeth apart, she draws his face firmly against hers. Her lips are thick and encompassing, pushing hard, so that her tongue can writhe into him, behind his symbolic fangs, turning him inside out.

As she pulls back, her teeth pin down on his lower lip. The skin stretches away from his face, straining. At last she lets go. His lip snaps back in place with a damp, fleshy pop that echoes in the hollows of his cheeks. His mouth is flushed and glistening, his attention on high alert, distilling to a sharp, quick, predator-clarity behind his eyes. Now that the apex has acknowledged her as a threat, she shows her incisors in a cold grin.

"Are you imagining me naked?" she says.

"Don't flatter yourself," he says.

"Self-flattery requires a surprising degree of imagination—or perhaps not so surprising, depending where you stand." She starts to open his pants.

He seizes her wrist.

Narcissa, no longer grinning, stares at him steadily. "Never has a man stopped me from reaching into his pants. Perhaps you're not a man at all, Captain Levi."

"Perhaps not, then."

"Either way, I'll have you. I'll have this—" Her hand clamps down, over his unzipped pants. His spine bolts to attention. "Oh . . . it's indeed there. I wasn't sure." Her incisors shine out. She detaches from him, her breasts heaving off his shoulders. "I'll give you a few minutes alone to collect your thoughts. Then you'll come to suite 217. I'll be waiting."

It isn't until after she's gone, leaving him to himself, that the cold, black, inward fury finally appropriates him and he seizes up another stone to hurl it across the water, with a savage, core strength that ripples down the length of his arm and communicates his anger through each cord of muscle to his fingertips, and finally onto the stone, thrusting it forward and out of his hand, flying. Sustained by the strength of his cold, black fury, the stone slaps the water's surface indefinitely, ricocheting hard across the wrinkled spill of moonlight bleeding into the pond. A wake of expanding rings follow each skidding contact, until the stone ultimately vanishes in a final distant slip. Jerking up his fly, exhaling heat, he shoves his hands in his pockets and watches the pond gradually return to its placid stillness. The snarl in his upper lip, too, smooths into its solemn self-possession.

He goes into the hall, passing door after door, on a trajectory toward the stairwell. Room 145 gives him pause. He stops in front of it, staring. Then he seizes the handle. It's unlocked, he pushes inside. In the darkness, Hanji is splayed, belly-down, across the bed, occupying as much surface area as possible with her two boneless arms and loose spray of long brown hair.

Locking the door, he moves to the upholstered armchair by the window and sinks into it, his hands wrapping the armrests. Hanji's sleeping face, paled by the night shining through the window, is opened toward him, her mouth gaping blackly. Her back is bare, naked muscle coiling along the wings of her shoulder blades and along the curve of her spine. Her glasses sit on the bedside table. Two silver moons hang in miniature inside the lenses.

"Levi?" Hanji's eyes come open partway.

"What is it?"

"It seems I've come to an unfortunate conclusion while you were away." Her voice is a naked whisper. "It's become apparent to me that an abnormal is undesirable. Now I need you to say to me, 'that's not true, you idiot four-eyes.' Say it like that, okay?" He doesn't say anything, her eyes staring blindly out at him in the dark. "You'll have to lie, of course. But, you see, I need to hear I'm wrong, even though I'm right. Yes, it's a silly thing. But it'll make me feel a bit better."

"It's late, you idiot four-eyes. Go back to sleep."

"Yes, you're right. Everything seems worse at night. I'll feel much better in the morning."

She closes her eyes again, and her face adopts the uneven texture of unconsoled, suppressed emotion, rumpling up beneath her expression, taking root in the span of her brow and around her mouth. Tugging the blankets flush to her throat, she curls onto her side and her eyelashes begin to glisten. A pearly bead slides out, by accident, and is pulled over the bridge of her nose to the opposite set of eyelashes. Light moves down her throat column as it heaves in the dark. Levi puts his fist against his cheekbone. When he closes his eyes, he sees in his mind's eye, an iridescent drop plunge into a pool of liquid loneliness, sending out expanding rings of solitude that subside, by and by, into nothing.


End file.
